This is a notebook of projects I attempt with a Raspberry Pi or wearable technology

About me

In the photo I am in the blue blouse. It's taken on the famous little railway to Shimla. I'm a Code Club volunteer and love messing about with computing and particularly coding in Scratch. I want to get into 'maker' stuff using my Raspberry Pi but I'm a complete newbie. I am learning a bit about electronic making by going to Leeds Raspberry Jam once a month. I'm looking to do a robot project with the Raspberry Pi Zero in the future. I've just started an adventure to code wearable LEDs using an Adafruit Gemma. And I've been lucky to have been given a CodeBug so I'm learning to use that too!

Size matters – #PiZero working hooray!

The cables from swag.raspberrypi.org came today: a bargain at £4 + £1 postage. That means that with my £6 pihut microSD card, with Raspian already on it, I’m in business. Actually I think I should have bought the SD card with NOOBS on instead – and also forked out for an SD card adapter (£12 for micro SD card + adapter) so that I could fit the micro card into my older R Pi Model B if necessary and then I could upgrade software at a later date. Still, never mind. These are the things that Geek Grans learn and are able to pass on to people who are less impulsive than me! Well, I am a Geek Gran you know – and, frankly, life’s too short when you’re my age, to wait and get everything right.

There’s a nice diagram on page 16 of Mag Pi Issue 40 to show you where to plug each cable in. (Find Issue 40 to download on RaspberryPi.org .) So, when I’d plugged it all in and switched on, I got a message box asking me if I wanted to install Raspian or something else. (There was one other choice which I didn’t understand.) I decided to click the Raspian check box then wondered what to do next as there was no ‘OK’ button. I clicked on the ‘Install’ icon on the top left of the message box and the Pi Zero set to work installing. It took ages: I vacuumed a whole room while it was working! Then the screen went black and I thought ‘Oh crikey. I’ve done something wrong’. Eventually the reassuring raspberry in the middle of the screen appeared. There’s all the usual software such as Python3 and Scratch1, so I’m getting ideas on how to exploit the ‘micro’ attributes (i.e. weight and size) of the Zero with these, and am a very happy gran today!